Morse Code: A Summer Project that Could Save Your Life
Several years ago, my husband read Cheaper by the Dozen aloud to our family. As a family with 12 children ourselves, we all loved the Gilbreths’ stories and could easily relate to many of them. One of my favorite parts of the book was seeing the creative (and somewhat sneaky) ways the parents found to teach their kids useful knowledge (such as Morse code) — even during summer vacations.
Among other things, these efficiency experts…
- put a record player in the bathroom so kids could listen to foreign language lessons each morning while dressing
- painted and labeled all the planets of the solar system on the wall of their house
- left secret messages in Morse code and gave prizes to first child to figure them out
Keep in mind, this was well before the days of Google. How would the kids know how to translate those Morse code messages? Their dad printed a mnemonic on the wall to help them remember it. We are given only the first few letters in the book, but I extrapolated from there to make the following chart for my own children:
Since today (April 27) is Samuel Morse’s birthday — inventor of the telegraph and creator of the code used to send messages across it — I printed out this little list and taught it to my kids and grandkids this morning.
I also took another page out of Frank Gilbreth’s book and composed several messages for the kids to decipher, awarding a prize to the one to finish first. I’ll come back in another week or so and share all those messages here, once my kids have had a chance to translate them. (Don’t want any of them peeking at the solutions online instead of working it out with pen and paper.)
Every family should learn how to send an S.O.S. signal in Morse code, as it is am international signal of extreme distress, used especially by ships at sea. Hopefully, you’ll never need to use it, but just knowing dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot might someday save your life. You might use it to bang on pipes, flash lights, knock on walls, or even blink your eyes to let others know you need help.
At the very least, studying Morse code makes a great hands-on history lesson. Our children got their first taste of sending, receiving, and translating telegraph messages at a museum near Denver, CO (although the code posted in the photo below was American Morse Code and differs slightly from the International alphabet shared in our printable).
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Could you explain how the mnemonic helps? I’m feeling very silly here, but I can’t figure out how it’s easier than just memorizing the pattern for each letter.
Ha! Don’t feel bad. Mnemonics only make it easier for some people (like me). For others (like my husband) mnemonic devices only serve to complicate memory work unnecessarily.
From the sound of it, you probably fall into the same category as my husband. He is really good at memorizing information and doesn’t need any tricks to do it.
For the rest of us, the way the Gilbreath family used this particular device (and what I’ve attempted to emulate) was to associate each letter with a word or phrase that would immediately call up the pattern of dots and dashes required to form that letter.
The word or phrase starts with the letter you’re trying to memorize: A = Away, B = Beautifully, C = Careless Children, etc.
Then, for the most part, the stressed syllables and/or long vowels stand for dashes, and the unstressed syllables and/or short vowels stand dots.
In the word “away” the first syllable is short and the second is stressed: Thus, “A” is dot-dash.
In the phrase “careless children” the first syllable in each word is stressed and the second is short; Thus, “C” is dash-dot-dash-dot.
Simply trying to memorize the list of patterns and letters might be a challenge for anybody, but I’ve found that where this mnemonic really comes in handy is in speeding up my translation.
While I can’t automatically go straight from the sounds to the letters they represent, I can transcribe a telegraphed message (or one sent by a child or grandchild with snaps and claps) provided the person sending the message slows down a bit. Then this mnemonic enables me to quickly translate the series of dots and dashes I jot down on paper into coherent English sentences.